From Monolithic To Microservices with MuleSoft
Customer Scenario
Without knowledge or experience with micro services, applications can quickly become monolithic, cumbersome, and costly to maintain. For a logistics client, that is precisely what happened. Despite using MuleSoft, their business application was large and complex. It didn’t take advantage of functional decoupling and was resource-intensive, using 4 to 8 vCores depending on the load at a given time. It was difficult to update, and the stability and scalability of the application were significant challenges.
Solution
Big Compass was brought in to help the organization realize improved ROI on their investment through a redesign of the application and executing on the new design. The team began by understanding all functional and business use cases for the application, including inbound and outbound endpoints and file transfer requirements. From there, Big Compass identified 15 different micro services that could be created to break up the vast and complex application. In addition, the team recognized opportunities to improve the functionality of these application elements that would increase visibility, reliability, processing speed, and more. Each micro services was planned with the MuleSoft vCores in mind, ensuring efficiency and future scalability.
Result
Once implemented, the company saw its vCore usage cut in half, and support and maintenance decreased by more than 50%. With increased uptime, stability, responsiveness, reliability, and speed, the application now handles ten times the traffic it did before, without a need to scale resources. During the rare occasion of an incident, the system can maintain its uptime thanks to the encapsulation of the application’s services.